Zambia World Wide

It had to happen again, that’s what life with Jan was all about, constant surprises. I arrived home from work, once again Jan was waiting for me at the gate as before. She had a smile on her face and said promise you won’t get angry, come and see what I have got. I walked round to the back of the house and there she was, the most gorgeous and friendly little monkey I have ever seen. Needless to say Jan was driving into town and passed a Zambian at the roadside selling a monkey for food. Once again Jan couldn’t let that happen, once again she bought it and brought it home. So we now had another addition to the family, the monkey was a green vervet which meant she wouldn’t grow too large. Jan named her Cissy, she was quite young and soon settled in and began to drive Smokey wild. I remember one afternoon we were sitting in the garden under an avocado tree when all of a sudden we found we were under attack. We were being pelted with avocado pears, when we looked up there was Cissy high in the tree throwing avocado’s down on us, it would not have been so bad but she was laughing and shrieking with glee. On another occasion she chased Smokey up a tree and there he sat unable to get down, Cissy by then was back on the ground jumping up and down, laughing at him. I of course had to get him down, there were times when I could have throttled her. When they were together they were a riot, they both had the run of the house and garden. I won’t say any more about the antics they got up to, let it suffice to say we did not dare to have ornaments in the house and the curtains got a lot of use. I am sure that by this time Smokey was half monkey, he had certainly learnt to hold his own whether in the air or on the ground.

It was about this time we had the opportunity to move house, we had never been to happy living where we were. However the main reason for moving was security, we would be moving into the company village which was very secure. Where we were living was an area well known for burglaries, which was a constant worry. Over the next few weeks we were quite busy working in the garden and doing odd jobs around the house, finally we had things as we wanted. This house had much larger grounds so we decided to employ a gardener.